I'm a senior editor and the Shanghai bureau chief of Forbes magazine. Now in my 14th year at Forbes, I compile the Forbes China Rich List, Hong Kong Rich List and Taiwan Rich List. I was previously a correspondent for Bloomberg News in Taipei and Shanghai and for the Asian Wall Street Journal in Taipei. I'm a Massachusetts native, fluent Mandarin speaker, and hold degrees from the University of Vermont and the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

China Stock Accounts Opened By Foreign Institutional Investors At A Four-Year High

The Shanghai Stock Exchange is located in the country's Lujiazui finanial district. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The number of accounts opened by overseas-registered institutional investors to buy China’s main domestically traded stocks rose to a four-and-half year high in March, the state-run Shanghai Securities News reported on Friday.

Some 26 institutions opened an account under the country’s Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor program, the largest one-month total since November 2008 during the global financial crisis. For the first three months of the year, 52 institutions opened accounts, about the same number as during the entire second half of last year, the paper said.

The account-openings are part of the process under which foreign institutional investors are allowed to buy into the country’s main A-share market. Foreign individuals aren’t permitted to directly purchase A-shares.

Chinese billionaires with A-share companies include Liang Wengen of Sany Heavy Industry, a key rival of Caterpillar in China, and Zhang Jindong, the chairman of Suning Commercial, a self-styled Amazon and Wal-Mart of China.

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